This video is a compilation of my harvests in the agroturismos of Italy, the desert of Argentina, and the sunshine of northern California. The music is one of my favorite songs of all time, it’s called Voyageur by Enigma. I moved out to California a year ago with a bottle of GrapeThinking, a bottle of ideas I guess you could say, that started filling up 5 years ago with conversation between myself, Jacob Bohall, Ruarri Rogan, Meghan O’Malley, and many others. Over the past year, those ideas have delightfully fermented, and the time has finally come for us to have a taste…

~circuit to cell, web to water, mind to vine~

The basis is an engine… a thinking engine that drives sustainable development, and more specifically, the health of the world. How do you create something in which the consumption heals the body and the production heals the earth?

Think about it

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They bought a car with another girl (the rock star of the group), and were planning to head way north to work on a farm for a little bit. They invited me to go, so I left my suitcase with a friend in San Francisco and hit the road with them. The following few weeks were beyond amazing… so many serendipities. My favorite was running into one of the winemakers I worked with everyday for 2 months in Argentina earlier this year in a small grocery store parking lot in Napa, and I just so happened to have a bottle of the organic wine we worked on in my backpack. Our car turned into a sustainable circus. We worked on the farm we set out for, did a little harvest work at a winery, but mainly stayed on the road visiting sustainable farms all around northern Cali. We touched Humboldt, Mendocino, Sonoma, Napa, and Marin.

A couple of our favorites were Filigreen Farm in Anderson Valley, where Chris Tebbutt has built an amazing mixed biodynamic agriculture setup of vines and fruit orchards, it was incredible. He also had huge solar arrays setup that produce 100% of the farm’s energy… a true thinking farm. We also visited Paul Dolan at his biodynamic Dark Horse Farming Ranch in Ukiah, which was powerful. He has an “energy center” with his flow form, preparations, and a stunning “bug strip” of crazy flowers and vegetation that generates the biodiversity and balance in his vineyard. On our way south, we made a stop at Solar City somewhere on 101 south of Ukiah, which is a sustainable building/living community. We slept in a teepee and talked about what it takes to build sustainable communities.

Somewhere along the way we got tipped off about the Bioneers conference down in San Rafael so we trekked down there and crashed the conference for the weekend. I talked to Rebecca of the Biodynamics Association about heading up their booth for a day in exchange for a free pass, and she graciously accepted my offer. We got to see some amazing speakers and share even more amazing ideas, and I was able to pitch biodynamics all day Sunday at the trade show.

We just kept going, drinking, laughing, breathing, seeing how these amazing farms are changing the environment, all while staying break even along the way. We went crazy and then sane and then crazy again. It was a ride. Now, I’m back in San Francisco to soak in what this place is all about, and make some magical elixirs along the way…

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Welcome to the first taste palace

Finally found one after two months in this country

Ill hit you with the pomengranates right off the bat… boom

Apricots, japanese medlar, peaches, pears, plums… apples down there

Vegetable garden, sangiovese vineyard, olive trees

They make their own wine, they make their own oil. They grow all their own vegetables

Cabbage, carrots, onions, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, peppers…herbs, basil, salvia, thyme, rosemary

Pretty much got it all nailed

Thats Antonio, he’s the son that owns the place

We’re right aside of Siena, everbody knows Siena, I’ll show it to ya real quick

There’s Siena… haha… this is it… there’s Siena

But again, so we’ve got wine, we’ve got olive oil, we’ve got every fruit you can imagine, even pomegranate. Vegetables, herbs.

The only thing missing is what? Energy, right? Solar

Generate all this produce to sell back to the grid, generate energy to sell back to the grid. Bring people here… tourism. And not some pretentious bullshit where they come here and say… it’s spiritual… you’re gonna feel it, and feel god, and all that.

Come here and just eat the food, just eat it. See the energy and see the money they make… because it’s alot.

That’s it… this is, this is it.

You start bringing these places, creating these praces, growing these places all over the world, and you’ve got a taste economy. You’ve got a transcendence from materialism back to a connection to nature becuase it makes people feel better, it makes them have more fun, it makes them more money, it makes the world healthier.

And it’s land too, so there’s all this space to generate energy from that thing (sun). So weird how this camera makes the center black. Anyways, there’s a lot of energy coming from that down into all this stuff (vines).

That’s it. The taste palace

Welcome… to taste

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I stopped by Troy, NY back in August at the beginning of my cross continental journey into nature to visit Eben at his Ecovative office on the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute campus. I had recently become fascinated with the mycelium substance that they’re using to grow… that’s right, grow… a polystyrene substitute. As many of you know, polystyrene, also known as styrofoam, is one of the most non-biodegradable products made by man, and utilizes a ridiculous amount of energy to produce. It is a peak product of egoic, ecological destructive manufacturing that must be eliminated from our supply chain and environment.

Ecovative Design’s flagship product, Greensulate, combines local agricultural products with cellulose to form a particulate that is then bound together using the magic of mycelium. The finished product is a grown biological composite. The world’s first sustainable rigid board insulation that serves as a direct replacement for polystyrene. This is fascinating stuff!

Here’s an endorsement of PICNIC by President Clinton that I thought was interesting:

Also, here’s some sci-fi mycelium perspective for you:

1) The largest and oldest living organism in the world is a mycelium patch in eastern Oregon

2) If we were to terraform Mars, we would start with mycelium (fungi) in a symbiotic relationship with algae to make the soil inhabitable for seedlings and create photosynthesis to oxygenate the atmosphere.

3) More and more studies are showing that this stuff is natures neural network and that our minds have evolved from it! Check out Paul Stamet’s book Mycelium Running for more info or his TED talk on 6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World… this is going to be big.

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Wow, what an excellent conference! A game changer. I have to thank my friends over at Village Green Energy for hooking me up with a free pass. I’ve been so passionate about this movement as long as I can remember… ever since 6th grade when I messed around with electromagenetic fields and plants. Early education for me was all about ecology and environment, and that followed with rigorous economics in college, which I didn’t quite understand about myself until now. Having not gone into banking with my degree and now seeing the state of the economy I was like shit… but David Suzuki put it so clearly… it’s (eco)nomics. I can’t believe I never recognized that. I automatically associated economics with the greedy, short-sighted mentality of Wall Street that focuses solely on the bottom line and exploiting the market for cash and egoic status. Yet you realize the bottom line is not the statement of cash flows or the balance sheet… it’s the fuckin planet. Ecology + Economics = Sustainability. This conference was absolutely buzzing! People were feeling alive and connecting and touching each other like I’ve never seen in my life. We all knew the green revolution is ready and about to change the world in a big way.

The keynotes were superb with Al Gore, Jerrry Brown, and David Suzuki really leaving a moving impact on me. Nobody was afraid to go deep. Sure there was plenty of talk about clean tech innovations or green building or policy changes.. but more so people were incredibly open about spiritual and conciousness based changes that are going to take place around the world to solve this crisis. Sarah Susanka even brought the crowd to tears with her moving presentation. It’s so much bigger than green or solar or oil… it’s about enlightening the human race that we are one and we share the same spirit with each other and with the world as a whole. I found it to be quite the religious experience to be at this conference. A few others being recently when I went into the wild of Alaska for a few weeks and when I saw the Dalai Lama speak in Bethlehem, Pa.

Aside from the heavy stuff, there were tons of innovative companies doing everything from cutting edge solar installs, to green acrhitecture consulting, to new age battery storage, smart grid stuff, efficiency software, New Resource Bank (which is exploding with business during this banking crisis… lol gotta love it!) and sooo much more. You had builders, utility reps, entrepreneurs, mad scientists, engineers, and everyone was so open and loving and connecting. I was blown away… it took me 3 full days to digest it all.

There were also brilliant seminars and panels, the best one for me being the State of Investing in Clean Tech, where partners from KPCB, Foundation, Sigma, and DFJ (all the big Menlo Park firms) talked about what companies they’re investing in and what technology is working… and yet something was different. These are VCs and of course money is there first concern, but with this clean green movement we are finally going to enter into a phase of social… or better yet eco-capitalism… where we benefit the environment and the social welfare of all while making a shitload of money and creating a shitload of jobs. This is an unprecendented opportunity in economic human history. Create a concentrically cyclical supply chain and pass the prosperity around the world. I was inspired by the VCs stories of how they’re going green in their own lives and their deep personal commitment.

A few themes from the conference to leave you with:

1) Nature to the grid baby – energy, health, architecture

2) Ecology + Economics = Sustainability (Eco-Capitalism)

3) Sky power will fuel the earth

4) The only thing special about humans is our foresight… our ability to see and shape the future. So lets use it.

5) A new connected conciousness is emerging that will limit the individual ego that has evolved and scorched our earth with fragmented, disjointed, greedy agendas. The only chance at eternal life is if we live together as one.

6) Be the change you want to see in the world!

In my humble opinion, these are unprecedented and magical times in the history of our race and our planet. There’s no better place to be then right here, and right now.

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Then there was Evil, a Cabernet Sauvignon from Australia. I’m waiting for the right birthday to surprise a friend of mine with a bottle of ‘Bitch’ and a bottle of ‘Evil’. I know it sounds mean, but listen they’re still getting wine out of the deal. I guess because of the Yellow Tail success, Australian wines feel they have to be uber creative to make a dent. This brings me to the next Australian wine, Suxx. I haven’t bought this one yet, but ‘Suxx’ Syrah does sound tempting.

Sometimes it’s the artistry on the bottle that draws me in. Last week I had this fantastically delicious, angels dancing on your tongue wine. James Iafrati did the label art for ‘Jazz’. “The Jazz Quartet: Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah’ drew us in. From the Branham Estate Wines in Napa Valley, ‘Jazz’ is a bit pricier, but completely worth it. Did I mention that angels will be dancing on your tongue?

Don’t get me wrong, just because the label is awesome doesn’t mean the wine will follow suit. When I see a creative label, I think two things: maybe they are covering up their horrible wine with a cool label or possibly this wine is equal in its creativity and taste. Nine out of ten times I buy it because that’s how I do. Say it’s that one time I didn’t buy the bottle, well I’ll think about going and purchasing it until finally I go and buy it. I’ll let you know how that one tastes. What’s the lesson here? Just buy the wine. Buy those outrageous sounding wines and as always Wine Your Diet.

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Now this story struck a chord with me because from time to time in a winocentric situation people may sidle up to me and ask in hushed tones how wine can smell of apples, or blood, or cigars, and essentially the ultimate question is ‘are people putting apples/ blood and sweat into the wine?’ Whilst making wine may be a lot of blood sweat and tears, it is only so in a metaphorical sense. One has to really sympathize with this question because people often speak with such authority about wine that it makes people scared to ask obvious questions. Essentially the MIT story just demonstrates that the aromas inherent to a plant are at a biological level – and in trying to find what we smell, we’re doing some detective like nose-work and trying to gain a greater understanding of what is in the glass. Part of the guess work done is in being able to come up with linguistic descriptors on which to hang your hat. So in essence – the linguistic descriptor used to describe e-coli is ‘shitty’ whist we use ‘minty’ to describe Wintergreen, and all that MIT has done is swap the shitty with the minty.

At this juncture I insert a widget from Last FM which contains music similar to that of Feist… because I’ve been reading a lot of reviews about her – and one of the great things about music journalism is the attempts to describe a musicians sound, or voice. Essentially how does one describe a medium in words that should ultimately be heard? Feist has alternately been described by various reviewers as either sounding like ‘carved steam‘ or ‘crushed mirrors in a satin bag‘ – now there’s nothing in Feist’s genetics that lends to sounding like crushed mirrors in a satin bag… but its a fan-fucking-tastic description that really opens her up to the imagination. In this vein one could describe Eddie Vedder as ‘rusted razor blades slicing sandstone’ even… and though you may not know what that means it certainly makes you want to listen. Together with online reviews and recommendations, you may perhaps want to listen to Feist – apps like Last FM will also tell you who else she sounds like. So if carved steam doesn’t help… if one perhaps said Regina Spektor meets Cat Power, that may be more helpful. Following that, you may also be interested to find out she plays with Broken Social Scene… and so on down the rabbit hole.

This is where wine and music meet – at the point where words fail us in personal, private internal experiences – and we sometimes have to turn to a reviewer to help us explain or to a friend to get recommendations of what else tastes similar. Grapethinking and its team are on a missions together with many other bloggers to help explain what wine and technology mean to young people, what it means to us, and how we’d like it to change. So if you ever come unstuck, and perhaps are lost for words to describe something or need a bottle of wine that tastes a certain way – then don’t be shy, and give us a shout…

Also – don’t forget its Mother’s Day… so if you haven’t got a gift and need an idea go to about.com

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We take clones from vines, because the seeds will only produce a genetic mix of the plant the seed-bearing vine and the male plant which fertilised the seeds with its pollen. To get an exact replica – we need to take a cutting and graft it onto root-stock. Anyone who has ever tried out their green thumb at college whilst cultivating non-medical marijuana will be well acquainted with this process!

So, it stands to reason that nearly all varietals are derivative of Pinot Noir and have evolved over thousands of years of not only by natural selection – but farmer’s intervention as well. I’m sorry to break it to any wine-creationists out there that all the vines in the world didn’t just miraculously appear – but that’s what botany tells us anyway, and it’s generally wise to give science the last word!

As Pinot Noir is thought to be the source of all things winey, this particular article: The Grapevine Genome Sequenced, is rather interesting as it comments on the genetic sequencing of Pinot Noir. A few commentators weren’t quite sure how they felt about it – however, its been known for a while that certain farmers began splicing rat genes into tomatoes a while back in order to save tomatoes from being susceptible to frost (obviously this is part true, part urban legend.) I don’t see the problem really – for places like South Africa, which battle with leaf-roll virus – or others that are threatened by Phyloxeras or horn-beetle or harsh tannins etc. Imagine we could make all vines seedless – this would greatly reduce bitter tannins released in careless crushing. We could even make grapes less susceptible to oxidization and microbes, and reduce the need for using S02 – making red wines more accessible and less tannic.

However – where do we stop? Will wine-makers be Willy Wonkas, with Umpa-Lumpa’s crushing the grapes and fantastical scientists making wine that tastes amazing in curious and fantastic ways, with oenophiles waiting to get into the special wineries, where passage is given only to those who have a bottle with a golden screw-cap?

I’ve read a few articles about nano-technology’s potential implications on food and wine. Its hard to know what to say about this without getting into slippery slope arguments where people may forecast the end of wine as we know it if we permit too much tampering. However – if we consider that all wines are derivative of Pinot Noir, then it would seem that nature has done a lot of its own tampering, and its probably worth buying a lot of wine now and lying it on its side, because its going to be very interesting to compare the taste of now, to that of the rapidly approaching future.

The World Cup of Rugby is just around the corner and will be upon us in September. Now I know that American’s don’t really give too much attention to the amazing sport: but this year is perhaps a year to change your mind. As you may or may not know – France, Australia, Argentina, South Africa, Italy and New Zealand over and above being awesome regions for the production of wine – are also the world’s top Rugby players. In the rest of the world outside of America, we genuinely mean ‘world’ when we affix the term ‘world’ before a sports tournament – and thus watching one of theses series’ is about more than sport: it’s about international unity, global community and solidarity. This year the tournament is taking place in France (it only happens every four years) and so – for any of you curious globally oriented wine lovers out there, nows a chance to get yourself to France, participate with the rest of the world and get a taste of some great wines and some of the global culture too. For those of you unable to go – fear not – the World Cup of Wines , which is a virtual live wine-tasting taking place on September 1st, 7:30pm-9:30pm at the Virtual Wine website, where they’ll be pitting the wines of Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Argentina and South Africa against one another – so switch on, pull up a chair, get some wine and pick a side. The folks at Virtual Wine have done some pretty cool events in the past, which shows that this could pretty easily become a trend in the future of world wine tastings.

However – with the intent of drawing some attention to the of my passions – travel, wine and rugby – www.grapethinking.com in association with www.tastevine.com will be hosting our very own Wine World Cup for the month of September.

For every day in September myself and a handful of the wine blogerati (volunteers welcome) will be doing one review on one wine per day for each of the six countries. That’s 180 posts in total (and a lot of wine to be drunk.) I’ve already got 16 bottles which I will begin opening this weekend to start my reviews. At the end of each week we will decide on a winner – and at the end of the competition there will be one country and that comes out tops.

TasteVine is working on planning a few live wine world cup events in the south, which will be an opportunity to taste 6 wine regions at once, and an enormous variation in style, flavor and taste.

In addition we’ll be awarding prizes (details to follow) to people who make comments and having a random draw for people who subscribe to our blog during the duration of the competition.

I’ll be giving regular, brief updates of the goings on the the actual teams who are playing – and all in all this is a blog event which hopes to spark interest in global culture and give us all a good excuse to go out and try a lot of different wine!

The first post for the World Cup of Wine will appear at 10am EST on September 1st. We’re accepting reviews before then – and will be sure to feature any reviews we receive. Get tasting and may the best wine win!

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